The Tide Is Rising On Reputational Risk : BP And Arts Sponsorship

As London's river Thames reached high tide yesterday at 11.53am, seventy-five performers, wearing all black, entered the Tate Modern museum's iconic entrance space, the Turbine Hall. For 25 hours art collective Liberate Tate carried on an unsanctioned performance to urge Tate to drop its sponsorship deal with BP, one of the world's largest oil and gas companies.

The performance, entitled ‘Time Piece’, carried on throughout the night with 20 performers staying to the end at high tide today, at 12.55pm.

Starting from the bottom of the Turbine Hall slope and slowly moving up to fill the space as the tide rose, performers took it in turns to transcribe quotes with charcoal on the concrete floor. Each performer smuggled in a book to create a library of selected texts, including Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, the UNFCCC 2014 climate report, and Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, for use in the performance.

Before the museum closed at 10pm, it was a very public performance. This morning Tate closed off the Turbine Hall but visitors crowded to view the performance from balconies, and applauded as the performers left the building.

"We continued our performance throughout the night to allow the words we wrote to resound and let Tate know the tide is rising against its continued support for BP, which has a shocking history of environmental disasters, human rights abuses and lobbying against climate change legislation. We are very pleased to have achieved the full performance duration raising the temperature on the issue of oil sponsorship of the arts. We received so much support from visitors that Tate had to back down on their threat to force us to leave" says Yasmin de Silva of Liberate Tate.

Is there 'a rising tide against oil sponsorship' among the wider public ? If there is, it is bad news for many arts and culture organizations strapped for cash at a time of deep spending cuts.

BP has been one of Britain's biggest contributors to the arts. Since 2012 it has donated £10m ($15.6m) to some of the country's biggest tourist attractions in the arts - the British Museum, the Tate galleries, the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Royal Opera House.

Last week, protesters against BP’s sponsorship of the Royal Opera House succeeded for the first time in staging a protest within London's Covent Garden auditorium on Wednesday night. The Financial Times covered the protest, saying "Some of Britain’s biggest arts organisations and museums can expect a summer of disruption as the popular movement for fossil fuel divestment gathers pace, climate change activists have warned."

But here's the really interesting thing: the amount of money given to the Tate by BP is surprisingly small - as I discussed in February this year in my independent blog Board Talk in Buying Reputation Via Add-On Culture.

In case you don't have time to read it, here's an extract:

"But the newly revealed minutes of Tate’s Ethics Committee, which reviewed BP sponsorship in 2010, show some scrutiny of BP’s tar sands projects as well as of legal cases against BP as a result of the Deepwater Horizon spill. 'Tate has taken a public stance on sustainability and is arguably the cultural institution most in the public eye in the UK. In light of this the reputational risk to Tate of retaining BP as a partner is significant' say the minutes.

But the Ethics Committee concluded that 'taking a moral stance on the ethics of the Oil and Gas sector … is outside of Tate’s charitable objectives'.

Oh. Does that mean that charitable objectives lack a basic moral compass in a world of austerity?"

Back to today's protest. In March, Tate was forced to reveal the amount of sponsorship money it received from BP was an average of just £224,000 a year between 1990 and 2006, or forty times less than it received from Tate Members (full disclosure: I am one of those) last year, says Liberate Tate.

It also says that at the most recent AGM (which I missed) Tate members called for Tate to drop BP, and Tate revealed the deal is up for review in 2016.

But earth governance - on issues around climate change - arouses strong emotions, as does art. Both are initiatives that aim to be inclusive of a global public - climate change has become so because of organizations like the United Nations.

I'm a long-time journalist who never did like to specialize, as I have too many areas of interest in a fast-changing world. I am an independent writer/editor/consultant, an ex-Financial Times journalist and I have been a regular contributor to the FT in recent years. I now ...